SPECIAL SERIES ===> Should You Fire Clients?👋<=== | BATHROOM Break #40 (COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

0:28Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. Thanks for checking it out. We are back for another episode of The Bathroom Break. This is Jay Schwedelson from the Do This, Not That podcast. And I'm here with the great Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials podcast. And today we're going to be talking about firing clients. But before we talk about firing clients, we've got a big football game coming up. The Super Bowl is coming up. And for those of you who don't know, Daniel was a Division I football player, University of Cincinnati and San Diego. university of san diego do i have that right i think i have that right you got it right and so i got a question for you when the super bowl is coming up are you like oh wow i love football i'm all hyped and you like planning it out for like weeks and you can't wait to go and eat nachos and and analyze football or could you care less as a marketer i think it's a fun time as a football fan it's not a fun time why i just think nfl has got two entertainment game and dies if that's even a word but it's it's so much slower i like college football more there's more things going on there's more i rather watch college football than i felt but i do like it as a marketer super bowl of them the most creative marketers trying to put out the best content what about you uh well i don't want i'm very disappointed with both the chiefs and the eagles i can care less i wish it was new team so the whole thing sucks my biggest thing with super bowl is we get invited to like so-and-so's house for a super bowl party or whatever and i absolutely don't want to go because i wind up sitting next to an idiot who wants to tell me all the stats that they've memorized heading into that person's house and i just don't care and i want to watch the commercials i can't watch the commercials i only know one song by kendrick lamar and he's the halftime performer so the whole thing is a hot mess for me um jay just low-key just told everybody how popular he is that he gets invited to all these parties uh but yes it's tough going to those parties because you either can't hear anything or that's just if you really want good food go to the parties if you don't want to watch anything about those the game you go to a party well along those lines so i'm firing whoever's inviting me to a party so that way i i'll fire them as friends but speaking of firing them as friends i'm talking about firing clients We both have marketing services businesses, right?

2:56And there are some clients that we both have that we've had for years. We love working with them. It's great. But what about firing clients? Do you fire clients or do you just put up with nonsense? Like when do you know it's the right time to say goodbye to a client? especially in the service business if the time value and the time suck for all the communication doesn't equal the same amount because the usually it's only five percent or ten percent of clients that are really annoying and we do have standards for clients but the ten percent that it's usually people who don't pay a lot and then they ask for a lot more and they're annoying so what i figured out is that if you don't fire them, you're spending 10x more time on this one client where you could be going out to get two better clients in that person's place.

3:53So I hated for the time drain, the time suck, that also the stress is not worth it. Obviously, if you're just getting started, you might have to deal with that client for a little bit until you scale up. But I think once the time to value doesn't equal, then it's time to get rid of them. Yeah, I totally agree. And what I found in my business was years ago, we were wanting to fire more clients, like a lot. And I took a step back and I said, well, is there something we're doing wrong? And I realized we were doing a very bad job of management of expectations. We were kind of selling almost the impossible.

4:32Like all these amazing things are going to happen if you work with us. right and then out of the gate it you know might take some time for all those amazing things to happen and and the clients were on boarding and it wasn't going great and they were being super annoying and just poking at us and all this stuff we were saying get rid of you get rid of you get rid of you and really the problem was more how we were on boarding people and what we were telling them and and so we changed that we were more upfront about it which was great the other thing we did was we raised our minimums because to your point there's i think a direct correlation between how vocal and annoying a client might be and how little they spend.

5:10Because they're watching every single penny and they're nervous and they're whatever. And it just drives me bananas. So we upped our minimums and that helped a lot too. I think also going back to what you said, one of the best advices that I got when I was just working as a head of marketing ops somewhere is my boss told me, because I would get things done really fast and people started expecting that as you teach people how to treat you. So I think if you don't set expectations up front and have things in your contract that say, let's say you get X number of revisions, you have, here's the scope is clear.

5:47I think changing what you said up front, like you said, it has to be put in your contracts that you only get this much time, this many meetings, this many revisions, this many X, because that's when you screw yourself. And that's exactly if you don't do that, you start teaching people that it's okay to reach out on the weekends. It's okay to reach out doing Slack at all hours. It's okay to bug, teach your employees, boot the bad. You have to set that expectation. If that's not okay, this is how we run our agency. Yeah. And, you know, you bring up an important point. And I don't care how big the client is in my organization.

6:22It could be our biggest client. if they treat the team rudely, like they are inappropriate, cursing at them or doing something really over the top, whatever, that's a non-starter. That's goodbye. Don't care who you are for two reasons. Number one, I don't want to work with people like that. But most importantly, your team needs to know that you have their back and that you won't stand for that no matter what. because if not, I think the culture of your organization will deteriorate really fast. That if people on the team feel that something like that is allowable, then they don't want to be a part of that.

7:00And that's the fastest way to crush culture in a business is for people to not feel supported. At least that's what we see. It's also in every business is that if you try to sell to everybody, it starts becoming a problem. So going back and saying, look at your clients right now. What are my dream clients? What do they do? What are the characteristics? And having that in upfront process and knowing these are your dream clients. What happens to me a lot of the time is I just took on, oh, they slightly are in our ICP or they slightly, we could do this. And then we realized it was hard at work because we're not as good in that industry, or it was way more time because it took longer to write for that person.

7:48Sometimes you need to niche down to scale up. And I realized if you're super focused on one thing, the business scale is way faster than if you try to get more squeeze from all these different people that are fringe ICP or even not even in your ideal customer. Yeah. And it's not even a matter of like, uh, annoying clients or people that you want to fire in that regard. It's just not a fit and that's fine. And one of the things that we do, which has been really, really helpful is we have a list of vendors that we refer to, not people that we get, you know, any type of like referral fee, but different, different people that we refer to and other businesses, uh, for where we get asked where people think we do something that we actually don't do.

8:32Like we don't do SEO for example. Right. But we get hit up about doing SEO all the time. and there are certain companies that we refer to because we just don't do that. And the good part about that is when you're able to say, hey, these are great company, we know them, work with them, whatever, that person at that company then becomes a valuable part of your network. They appreciate the fact you referred them to somebody you know and then they'll connect you with somebody. So creating a list of companies and people that you can refer in each of the different buckets that are most requested of you that you don't do can turn into a real valuable thing for your overall business.

9:07And one last point I'll make is at a certain point in a business, that extra revenue is not worth that client. And that's something you have to just take a hit on. That extra revenue might take your team's freedom, your freedom away, your time, you're more stressful. And you have to do an audit to yourself, is that extra revenue really worth my time, energy, and time suck? And usually when you look back and you fire that client, you figure out they weren't worth our time. They weren't worth our energy. They weren't worth anything. So I think, and one point I want to just double down is I think pricing is the best filter for that.

9:52I think once you fire a client, raise your rates. Because usually at the start, you have these lower rates. And then you start more as the band goes. You have to raise rates to make that a better filter for yourself. All right. Before we wrap up here, I'm just curious if you were playing the Super Bowl and you could bring any musical talent to do the halftime show, anybody. I want to know who Daniel Murray is bringing to the Super Bowl to be the halftime show performer. it's a really good question um i i'm gonna go with it because i just saw the movie complete unknown i think like bob dylan to do it because he's been out of it for a while and like nobody knows i think i'll be like oh he's kind of like it's this mysterious factor he hasn't played for a while um that's a a cop-out answer i would say but i think i mean everybody what's your answer to the or the cranberries oh we love the cranberries but dolores horiordan passed away sadly so uh they can't she's not around anymore i love the cranberries i know um the cranberries would have been great well this year they have kendrick lamar i think it would have been really cool if they also had drake because they have beef and like they could have done their diss tracks live and even that would have been like something like that would be cool because like i said to my mom hey do you know kendrick lamar you know he's doing the halftime show and i i could have said do you know any any other human she's like i have no idea what you just said i don't know what a kendrick lamar sings does whatever so i think you need something that like resonates with a massive audience bob dylan would be good but i don't actually think he has the ability to do a 15 minute performance no shade on him i just feel like you know he's checked out a little bit what what the hell do i know i just think just like the beef online it's just this is your one last time to see bob dylan i think that'd be there's something how you market it would be the yeah everybody would be like i never saw bob dylan before uh just like that would be seeing the beatles one more time last time get paul mccartney come back and get taylor swift to do it that would be like epic that's what i was gonna say in my cop-out answer but i wasn't gonna go all right well um listen hope everybody doesn't go off and just fire all their clients after this episode that would be terrible hang in there and listen go follow the marketing millennial show fantastic daniel crushes it and we'll see you at the next one

12:28daniel come on man i gotta get back to work get out of there all right while he's still in there this is jay check out my podcast do this not that for marketers each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and i hope you give it a try oh here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millet podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marking tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email, subject line, to any marking tips in the world. We'll talk about it.

13:03Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.